meaningful madness

Nostalgia: circa 2512 bc

I’m not usually nostalgic. Not since drastically reducing my memory bandwidth allocation so I can have faster communication with the reality server.

I’m also not usually overly concerned about glitches in the communal reality interface as I’ve heard that even in the old days of meatsuits and material instantiation no one really had a clue where subjectivity ended and objectivity began.

I downloaded this memory a few nights ago while the singularity agency was tweaking my pleasure toolkit in return for sharing my inner circle of scientifically ranked fluffers.

But recently I have fallen victim to a strangely anachronistic concern. I was only about 3 years old when the first mass uploads took place and my elders have always carefully avoided talking about the bad old offline days.

And yet I still have clear and haunting memories – of the feel of wet soil between my toes. The cool smooth feel of the mirror. The smell of dad’s shaving cream. The taste of chocolate ice cream.

But I’ve fallen victim to dangerous doubts. I’m not convinced the latest reality simulacra are capturing all the nuances of the pre-upload days. And, as doubts do, they have begun to spread and worsen. What if the SexLoveRomance packages are missing something. Something important.

You see I never experienced much of that in the old, real, world. So I have no logical reason for believing that something is missing. And yet I’m haunted by this horrid retro notion – that even though the digital tactile resolution is about 1000 times faster by bypassing achingly slow skin – something vital may still have been lost.

And have this ridiculous desire to hold a lovers hand. After realworld lifetimes of every conceivable permutation of SexLoveRomance I just wish I could be back in the realworld – holding the hand of my lover.